writer, editor, modernist, and geek

Writing Advice Clearly Followed by the Writers Writing Last Night’s Episode of The X-Files

Fear not – no (or maybe a few very vague/mild) spoilers below.

Want to write like the folks who created last night’s premier episode of The X-Files reboot? Follow these 10 steps, and your readers will be “true believers” in no time…

Your female protagonist/love interest should be clean, neat, well dressed, thin, beautiful, and slightly embarrassed at being seen even a little less than put together, in a refined sort of way. Your male protagonist should wear pants. At least for now. Shaving is optional. Actually, no, leave him scruffy. Scruffy is sexy, right? That’s how you show your male lead is still sexy after all these years. A failure to shave more than once a week.

You’ll need a side kick. Someone eager to win over the protagonists. Someone with vast resources, all the answers, and a desire to share that with only your heroes. Someone to get them back into the game quickly, so you don’t have to do any complicated plotting or character introspection or anything. Oh, and the sidekick should be weirdly perky, in all situations. For fun, let’s have everyone else in the cast pretend not to notice how oddly perky the sidekick is. That’s called “acting”.

Monologues are okay if the hero is doing them. Maybe even the sidekick. But only men can monologue. And, um, let’s say only the white ones. Otherwise it looks too villan-y, and you don’t want that.

Oh, speaking of which, don’t write too many minorities into the story. Your reader will just get confused.

If you do include minorities, make them “safe” ethnicities, like Eastern European, light skinned dark person with no name, or Asian. The normal kind of Asian that you always see on TV: ambiguously Japanese (probably). Don’t confuse anyone by using specifics like “Vietnamese” or “Filipino”. Your reader or viewer only knows the samurai scientist kind and the dim sum waiter kind of Asian.

Oh, and if you do include minorities, they should be the only targets of violence. You have to ease the audience into the idea of violence by starting with the less important characters, so when Important White People are injured later, it will have greater impact.

The female lead should be in the same room as other women only briefly, and only if she can be professionally dismissive, or slightly jealous of the other’s youth and beauty. But don’t make it too obvious, because feminism.

Talk about the past a few times, to establish that yes, you watched or read every single episode/movie/tie in novel. Don’t show anything or anyone you reference, though. Just a few, repetitive, comments will be enough.

Heterosexual men and women should not have too much chemistry together. Heterosexual men should have a lot more chemistry with other heterosexual men. Because bros.

Save the female doctor’s science reveal for the very end, because women shouldn’t science much. Oh, and while she’s had access to the tools, technology, and samples for years, make it never occur to her to have checked these things until there’s a man around to suggest it. We wouldn’t want the story to be that unrealistic.